NEARLY FOUR CENTURIES AGO , twenty Africans’ feet first hit the shores of a foreign continent that would be the setting of a great human atrocity. They stood in the settlement of Jamestown in the colony of Virginia, land that would eventually be part of the United States of America after its inhabitants and those of the other colonies declared independence from the British government that denied them what they insisted nature gifted every human being. Those who claimed that men have “certain unalienable rights” hypocritically withheld that principle from the ancestral kind of those twenty Africans. That frightful decision has haunted this country, working many horrors upon it; civil war, murder, disenfranchisement, segregation, and the like can all indeed be traced back to the regrettable compromise between slavery’s opponents and its defenders.

Men and women of all races have exhausted their brains, bodies, and spirits to atone for that calamity. Their admirable industry has improved the nation. Those with black skin, the target of the wicked, invigorated by a muscular fidelity for their people, have long been leaders. To think of those who have opposed their work, not as individuals, but as a faceless mass of evil - a cloud of bigotry has been common. But individuals they are; individuals of different colors, genders, ethnicities, and religions. And on the road to unbridled racial equality, blacks must bring overwhelming force to defeat each and every one of them.